Someone famous once said, People believe lies easily provided they are big enough. Conventional Wisdom in Washington is currently inflicting two large egregious lies on the people they supposedly represent.
The First one is that the Occupy Wall Street Movement is, to quote Frank Miller, “nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness," As a former fan of his work, I can say with confidence, that I will find it very hard to forgive him for this statement and I don’t believe I can look at anything he does in the future without recalling this bit of harmful ignorance.
The Second is that we must embrace austerity measures in the United States in order to facilitate “job creation”. The two are very much linked. One of the criticisms I’ve heard of the Occupy protesters is that they “don’t have anywhere else to go” or they “ought to go get a job”. For the record, the real unemployment rate the U6 (the one which takes into account the underemployed and the discouraged unemployed) is at 15.6 %. That is a lot of underutilized labor for a nation! And it provides a lot of time for people who would rather be working to make it down to their local Occupy protest and add their voice to the outrage at the tyrants who have destroyed our economy and would love to do it again if given the chance.
My Congressional district, Nevada #2, recently had the misfortune of having former mining lobbyist Mark Amodei become our Representative in Congress. So far he has had a 98% voting record with the obstructionist Republican majority (the one with the 9% approval rating). I recently got a flier from his office. (I don’t for a second think that he could be bothered to actually write something for his constituents, it might interfere with his time on the Golf Course laughing with lobbyist buddies about how easy it is to fool the average working person) It informs me that he is serving on the Judiciary Committee and has given himself the noble title of “Guardian of the Constitution”.
Nevada 2nd’s “Guardian of the Constitution” loves the Bill of Rights so much that he voted for the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011 which includes the right for the military to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens without trial on US soil! That is not guarding the Constitution. That is shredding the Bill of Rights and the right to habeus corpus. He must be thinking of the Constitutional right of Health insurance companies to deny coverage to someone based on a pre-existing condition when he adopts the title of “Guardian of the Constitution”.
It’s worth noting because the Constitutional rights of the Occupy Wall Street protesters are being largely ignored as I write this. Whenever I’ve interacted with the Occupy Wall Street crowd I’ve seen genuine victims of the system protesting through their Constitutionally protected Freedom of Assembly, not “louts, thieves, and rapists”! However even if they were louts, thieves, and rapists, the Constitution would still apply to them.
The Constitution of the US says in very plain language, that “the accused shall enjoy the right…to be informed of the nature and the cause of the accusation” and that “the rights of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated!” and “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed nor shall cruel and unusual punishments be inflicted”
If you read this first hand account of Occupy Los Angeles being forcibly evicted, you will find a brutal disregard for the US Constitution as the arrests were made as uncomfortable and cruel as possible, the property of the protesters was “forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison”. The author was lucky, being a Hollywood writer, that he could afford to get bailed out rather quickly, but not everyone brutalized by the infamous LAPD at a cost of $5000 for bail was so lucky.
And it is worth noting that it was a Democratic mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, with a supposedly strong labor organizing background in California that inflicted that blow on non-violent protesters and then said that it was LAPD’s “Finest Hour”. If the sold-out equally corrupt Democratic leadership looks on to the crowd it treats in that manner and sees potential voters-it is suffering from serious delusions!
But what made all of this possible is the halls of Conventional Wisdom in Washington. Conventional Wisdom is usually wrong and expensive! Keep in mind the track record of conventional wisdom in the past few years gave us-
an expensive war based on lies about WMDs in Iraq
claims that the Housing market will continue to be a Seller’s market forever
and claims that austerity at a time of high unemployment is how you bring about prosperity for all.
All of which have had as much basis in reality as the conspiracy theory regarding the President’s Birth Certificate. The concepts are dreamed up in think tanks in D.C. and repeated ad nauseum on godawful AM talk radio shows, Fox News and even mainstream news until millions of citizens who have no reason to like or bother with the Heritage Foundation or AEI’s agenda are repeating these talking points and thinking only within the framed debate. In effect they believe lies easily because the lie is big enough.
The latest one is the only way to create jobs is to brown nose the parasites at the top of our financial system.
It has become a talking point for the past few years while unemployment has hurt this nation and we can look forward to the lie being repeated en masse in the campaign already. Romney has said in an interview with Fox News that “I’m very happy in my former life; we helped create over 100,000 new jobs.” And blamed the 6 months of job losses that Bush caused in the first six months of 2009 on Obama. An honest look at the numbers shows both assertions as fraudulent opportunism.
Bush inherited a recession, too. But since he has an R behind his name, he gets to starts his numbers for job creation not on Inauguration Day but on August 2003. If Obama had an R behind his name and got to play by those same rules, he would get credit for creating 2.5 million jobs since 2010! For Romney to display such blatant hypocrisy with numbers speaks volumes of what kind of President he would be. Also, Romney only counts the jobs created by Bain capital (even after he left) and does not count any of the jobs destroyed or the effects on competitors. Such selective reasoning is the same selective reasoning that leaves working families paying more in taxes and expands our deficit under his economic plan.
And sadly, none of this matters. The sound bytes that are repeated in time for a commercial is “Romney=job creator”and "Obama=worst job loss in History". And even if the numbers are brazenly false, if you can get a certain amount of the population to repeat that without thinking, you have the political equivalent of WMDs in Iraq and the lie becomes truth (at least for the moment). Disaster inevitably follows.
Do the policies of brown nosing parasites actually create jobs when all is said and done?
At a recent event organized by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon remarked that, "Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and that everyone who is rich is bad — I just don't get it." And he was right, not everyone who is successful is bad. And he is also right that he “just doesn’t get it!” Certainly the people organizing sub prime mortgages into worthless securities, selling those securities while betting against them and then getting bailed out by tax dollars ARE not only bad, but also evil and parasitic.
But read a little further down in the article. You will find that JPMorgan Chase is able to buy back $8 Billion dollars in stock this year. You will also find that they were going to open up 300 branches in 2012 but downgraded that number to 175. Officially, they are blaming “new regulations”. But none of those new regulations would affect the fact that they have $ 8 Billion with which they choose to buy back stock instead of create jobs. Ideally that 8 Billion should be lent out to businesses and municipalities so that the Bank can make money and jobs can be created.
Of course that $8 Billion would go to raising the value of the stock and the options package, which Jamie Dimon enjoys. And then he can afford to go to his very favorite restaurant one more time a week and that restaurant can hire one more part time busboy.
Silly me, I guess brown nosing tyrants does create jobs…or at least a job.
Oh and that famous person who said "People believe lies easily provided they are big enough."... it was a quote from a rather famous German politician named Adolph Schicklegruber…
Otherwise known as Hitler.
